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In Summary: Digital disruption can be frightening, especially when so many players are out of view. By analysing the sources of disruption based on the fundamentals of supply and demand, it's easier to understand potential digital threats.

McKinsey have developed a framework for uncovering the primary sources of digital transformation. The first zone highlights the making of new markets, where supply and demand change less. The second exposes the dynamics of hyperscaling platforms where the shifts are more profound

In some industries, digital technology 'exposes' new sources of supply that were previously impossible. In another, it removes distortions in demand and 'unbundles' product and services

Understanding the forces at work in digital disruption helps explain not only which companies will disrupt a business but also why.

Making Product

The right product strategy is as important to a successful launch as pouring the right foundation is to building a home, says Jim Semick.

In Summary: If your product is new, creating a solid product strategy must happen first in the product development process — before you begin creating feature lists, user stories and detailed customer personas. A 'bottom-up' approach to roadmaps is counterproductive and leads to a weak product.

As a Product Manager, you are both your product’s chief strategist and its chief communicator. Different stakeholders are looking to you to explain the 'why' of your product to them. Having a clear product strategy makes it easier to articulate the product vision to any constituency across your company. It also allows you to more clearly identify priorities.

A top-down approach starts with the vision and strategy for your product. From the product vision you can derive product goals that will translate your product strategy into an executable plan.

In Summary: Identifying what to put on your roadmap is a challenge for Product Managers. But prioritising items can be even harder. Removing your personal bias towards 'favourite' features or engineers' inclination to work on the most technically challenging are just some of the challenges of prioritisation.

Having trialled a number of points-based prioritisation systems, the team at Intercom settled on a method they call RICE: Reach, Impact, Confidence and Effort. By applying a numeric value to each of these vectors, Sean calculates 'total impact per time worked' – exactly what Product Managers need to maximize.

A scoring system like RICE helps Product Managers make better-informed decisions about what to work on first and then defend those decisions to others. It does not need to be followed slavishly. But it's a welcome counter-balance to the tangled mess of gut-feeling that steers many products.

If you don’t like to write, you'll have a hard time as a Product Manager, says Notion's Kevin Steigerwald.

In Summary: The best advice Kevin wishes he'd received during his career as a Product Manager is 'Write everything down' - from the daily to-do list to project briefs, weekly status reports and release notes. But writing doesn't come naturally to everyone and there's no one tool that allows Product Managers to capture and convey everything effectively.

To ease our pain, Kevin outlines his preferred tools and a handful of templates for us to use.

In Summary: On the grand spectrum of inaction versus action it’s hard to argue that having a 'bias toward action' is a bad thing for Product Managers.

But risk assessment before action is key. That means some amount of investigation and analysis should occur before we take action, otherwise we’re just throwing the fate of our products to the wind.

Citing Amazon's 12 Principles of Leadership as the origin of this term, Cliff emphasises the need to understand it's role in the context of other key PM attributes. Otherwise, a bias to action can lead to an absence of strategy, constant firefighting and recklessness.

In Summary: When you spot a problem you want to fix, or an opportunity you want to seize, there are many things to do before writing a single line of code.

The first is to define the real pain you’re solving and the value you’re providing. Next is working out what people are doing now to solve this problem. Many products are competing with 'hacked' solutions that are 'good enough' to function as a solution. Finally, you need to know how you're going to change someone’s behaviour if they're not aware they’re 'doing it wrong!'

Don't invest energy and resources into the development of a product before doing research and creating a solid plan and strategy for going to market. By doing these things you can also figure out if the business you’re pursuing is something worthwhile.

Talking Product

In Summary: A key influence on the work of a Product Manager is the size of the organisation. Product Managers trying to decide which type of company to join should think about what they want to learn, the scale of work they want to be involved in and the level of influence they want to have.

Big company Product Managers get to impact a large numbers of users and also get to practice the fundamentals of Product Management according to a predefined process. However, their scope of control can be limited as requirements are often well specified by the time they reach them.

Small company Product Managers have a much larger impact on the product and a near-continuous feedback loop with customers. But they need to remain agile, so it's a challenge deciding which parts of the product can be 'good enough' and which must be excellent.

In Summary: The majority of Product Management resources are geared towards consumer products. As most consumer products are scale businesses, Product Managers make decisions with growth in mind.

Enterprise products, on the other hand, are exclusively direct-sales (subscription) models. They sell sophisticated products to a much smaller group of large customers for whom introducing new software is laborious and challenging.

In most companies, the person who uses a product is not the person who signs the check to pay for it. Executives pay first and foremost for functionality and business value, not pretty UIs. This is why most enterprise products are renowned for having horrible UX.

With only a few clients, each sale matters. Product Managers often work with sales to craft specific solutions for clients. In many ways, this makes them closer to their customers than their B2C counterparts.

Enterprise products tend to be highly specialised and come from a deep understanding of a user's business. Solving simple business problems isn’t going to make you any money - solving the hard ones does. And doing that takes time, focus and attention to detail, not hacking stuff together in isolation.

In Summary: Product Managers are natural unifiers. They're the best people to build bridges between departments that are usually kept separate. These include product development, sales, marketing, customer success and customer service.

All Product Managers should look around their organisation and try to find which departments may be feeling pain. By identifying where their goals intersect, they'll be able to make each department’s job easier and be more effective in driving retention and revenue.

Designing Product

In Summary: User onboarding requires innovation, experimentation and optimization; just like products do. There is no 'perfect' user onboarding flow. What works for one product might not work for another.

The true test of onboarding effectiveness is retention, not conversion. Successful user onboarding gets new users to perform the tasks that lead to long-term use.

With contributions from Intercom's Nate Munger and Samuel Hulick (the Godfather of Onboarding), Shanelle deep dives into the onboarding of Evernote, Typeform and Inbound.org (amongst others) to define best practice.

By focussing on all stages of onboarding and choosing a method that's right for your audience, Product Managers can build the habit loops that create successful products.